Personalization and Adaptation in Human-Robot Interactive Communication

In order to make Human-Robot interactive communication socially acceptable, legible, and natural from the user’s point of view, it is of paramount importance to endow a robot with the ability to model the users’ preferences, needs, and motivations. Creating robotic systems capable of correctly recognizing, and consequently, modelling the human behavior and preferences is a very critical and challenging task, especially in the domain of assistive and social robotics and when working with vulnerable user populations. A robot should be able to cope with local uncertainties of the environment, variations of the human desires and motivations, and volatilities of the interaction itself. The embodiment condition of a robot requires the abilities to extract such relevant information from the interaction history but also from the indirect observation of the user. This Special Issue aims at examining and promoting recent developments in the Personalized and Adaptive interactive communication in robotics, so providing to the UMUAI journal with a different perspective related to the specific characteristics of the interaction with a physical robot.